Recent Projects

In February 2024, the Army Corps of Engineers proposed a series of procedures to implement the governmentwide Principles, Requirements, and Guidelines for water-resource projects. The “heart” of these agency-specific procedures (ASPs) is ensuring that decisionmakers consider a wide suite of economic, environmental, and social benefits and costs as they invest in such projects. The proposal reasonably moves the Corps away from its historical and inefficiently narrow focus on national economic development to the exclusion of other essential objectives like environmental quality and distributional considerations. While the proposal takes valuable steps toward more comprehensive accounting of societal benefits and improved decisionmaking, our comments recommended several reasonable steps the Corps can take to make these ASPs even more effective.